Saturday, August 13, 2011

Savory Saturday: Update our Meals Challenge,Catching up with what we've made

We fished the first book! Yeah! The second book gave us some trouble, mostly because it is barely being held together by tape and took me an hour to get the pages in order, twice. So we are doing a few out of it and than moving on to the same month, next year. To spare you a million (or four) long posts that list everything I'm just going to share 16 recipes that we did make and work diligently to share weekly again :-)

Egg Toasts
I was nervous as I don't like runny eggs and PBgirl only eats eggs in things. But being able to choose what went on your toasts was fun! As was the extra bit of circle that dad added cheese too! So everyone ate and it was a nice breakfast for dinner that was different than the usual pancakes.

Beef and Grape Tomato Kebabs with Herbed Couscous
Kebabs are always fun for the kids and this was no different. Both kids ate all the beef and tried one bite of the tomato.

Herbed Couscous: We always use Trader Joe's whole wheat couscous. It's one of those whole wheat things that don't taste like cardboard. We actually think it tastes better than the regular one! To make it herbed you just add "a bit" (according to the magazine) of minced parsley to your couscous. We added probably close to a quarter cup and it still looked a lot less than the picture.

Best Beef Burgers with Grilled Corn with Seasoned Butter
So I love burgers, like really love could eat every day, burgers. So I was so excited that the grilling issues featured FOUR recipes! Yum, yum, yum. Now the beef one was eh...I don't like my beef burgers anything other than mooing (that's for you Hy!) but it was fun to mix it up a bit. PBgirl still doesn't eat burgers and PBboy thought it was the best burger ever (until his next one, seriously the boy loves burgers like his mama)

Lemon-Herb Rub
We used this on a whole chicken we had in the freezer. We just split the bird in half and grilled it. By We I of course mean my husband because I a) have no idea how to even go about cutting a chicken in half b) until last week had never grilled on a grill (I have oven open fire) before in my life. It's a great mild rub, we did it right on the skin after it had been in a brine and it was super tasty.

We used the leftover chicken to make...

Pasta with Chicken Tomato and Feta
This was so freaking good my mouth is watering thinking about it right now. Seriously. It was so filling and made so much I had it for lunch the next day too. The whole family loved it! I was worried that the feta would be too strong a flavor but it was perfect! Even PBgirl picked it out to eat it! We let the chicken warm up to room temperature so it wouldn't be so cold but this is essentially a no cook meal. Bonus for summer.

Grilled Pepper Crusted Sirloin with Creamy Baked Polenta and Grilled Mushrooms with Leeks
This was kind of our first bust of a dinner. Well for everyone but PBDad, but he likes everything. Could we have afforded a $35 piece of steak I may have liked it better (but we can't). It was way to peppery for even my good eater. The polenta was okay but not as good as the first time because it didn't have the sauce and the leeks, well I liked them better baked and crunchy. They weren't terrible, just not great.

So it's a burger so I want to love it it, but eh. The cumin flavor was a little overwhelmingly. It was supposed to be served with chiptole mayonnaise but we didn't make that (we were missing ingredients). Hubs loved the combination of the turkey and pork but also thought the seasoning was a little off.

Served with Italian sausage of course because we can't go meatless! It was yummy! Surprisingly so because it's only fresh thyme and tomatoes no other ingredients. The grilling really infuses so much flavor.

Skirt steak with poblano sauce
This was HOT but so, so good. My kids, even picky PBgirl DEVOURED the steak, like I was worried their wouldn't be enough for me (the didn't eat the sauce which is what had the heat). We served it with a cilantro lime rice. e

These were ridiculously hard to make. We got pizza crust from Trader Joe's and it was really uncooperative. We would stretch, it would sink, we would pull, it would shrink, we rolled, they would shrink. Than we put them on the grill, they suggested low, my MIL was over and suggested high (we suggest high). Good thing they were so yummy! We added leftover sausage to ours because we are carnivores.

Rigatoni with Goat Cheese

This was AH.MAZE.ING seriously. Even PBgirl ate it. Sadly the recipe is not online. Maybe I will post it someday, but this is getting long!

Now I do have a favorite turkey burger, it's light and involves mint so I was wary. This was yummy though!The cheese is mixed in to the meat it was great! We even got PBgirl to take her first bite of a burger! Score!

Surprising! We tried soy! Ginger! Yum! Even the kids ate it. The beans were fabulous. It's amazing how much flavor you can get from just a few ingredients!

Missing Pictures:

Zucchini and Chicken Salad this is like a pasta salad except the pasta is zucchini ribbons. We grilled the chicken and it was so amazing that we seriously over ate that night. It was incredible and I want it again now.

Creamy Corn Soup (tonight's dinner) I got beautiful corn form the farmers market to make this. I was very skeptical, all that is in it is corn, butter and salt. It was delicious. Not exactly filling, but would be a great starter dish.

Baked Beans these were also kind of a dude, not quiet flavorful enough.

Pheww, know we're somewhat caught up!

If you're on Pinterest all these recipes are collected on the board YUM!

As I'm planning next week is there an interest in doing a cook together? Should I use the book that's on newsstands now? Or Link recipes early (like tomorrow) so we can all try?

All photos were taken with my Android and processed with Vignette for Android. It's the only way I remember to take a picture before devouring the dishes!